Man vanishes on marijuana harvest day

Brown said Harris had told him that Willsey had recruited him as a partner in a pot-growing operation because he was good at cultivating the drug. A third partner in the operation was Keith Bergstrom, who owned the property in Delta County where the pot was grown. Willsey’s role was selling the drug, he said. The three were to split the profits equally, Brown said.

Brown said he went to Harris’ house that afternoon and waited for hours, but his friend never showed.

Brown had recalled that on the same day, Willsey drove to Bergstrom’s house in Harris’ jeep and shot Bergstrom in the head with a .22-caliber handgun, the same caliber of gun used to kill Harris. Willsey left Bergstrom for dead.

But Willsey wrote that the Bergstrom wasn’t shot until weeks after Harris disappeared on Sept. 24 and a .32-caliber bullet was used in “my case.”

A Colorado Department of Corrections document provided by Willsey in a letter sent in June of 2011, Willsey did shoot Bergstrom on Sept. 24, a month after Harris went missing, contradicting Brown’s version of when the men were shot.

On the day Willsey shot Bergstrom, Piety said he got a call from Willsey asking to be picked up at the Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport in Jefferson County. Harris’ car would later be discovered at Walker Field Airport in Grand Junction.

Willsey wrote that he flew out of Montrose, not Grand Junction. He had a bounced check and a criminal charge to prove it, he wrote. Willsey later sent a copy of an Montrose County arrest affidavit confirming that he had lied about who he was, claiming he was Bob Zugic of Colton, California. The document says he contracted with Barry Stott of Tellairco for a flight from Montrose to the Denver area using the false identification.

Bergstrom survived but was in a coma. Days later, when he regained consciousness, he told investigators it was Willsey who had shot him.

But Willsey said Bergstrom was never in a coma and the prison document he provided verified that when Bergstrom was found lying at the top of his staircase with a gunshot to the head, he immediately told officers that Bergstrom shot him. He said he did not know why Willsey shot him.

Willsey was convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to 32 years in prison.

Sheriff’s investigators believed there was enough evidence to charge Willsey with killing Harris and presented the case for prosecution to the Mesa County district attorney’s office, said Heather Benjamin, a spokeswoman for the sheriff’s office. But no charges were filed.

Willsey’s status in the Harris murder case has never changed, however, Benjamin said.

“There was a lot of circumstantial evidence that tied back to Willsey,” she said. “Willsey has remained the top primary suspect from the very beginning.”

Willsey, who is at the Buena Vista Correctional Facility, is currently parole eligible.

“I don’t mind being a suspect, but there is more to the story than has been presented to you,” Willsey wrote in his letter. He denied being involved in Harris’ death. He said prosecutors twice sought an indictment against him in the Harris case but both times the grand jurors refused to indict him.

“Don’t you wonder why I wasn’t indicted?” he asked in a June, 2011 letter. He said evidence points to other suspects, not him.

Benjamin said that every year, Mesa County sheriff’s investigators review the case to determine whether any new technology might help solve the case.

District Attorney Pete Hautzinger said the cold case has never been presented to him for possible prosecution.

Contact information: Anyone with information about the case is asked to contact the Mesa County Complex Crime Unit at 970-244-3265 or Denver Post reporter Kirk Mitchell at 303-954-1206 or kmitchell@denverpost.com/.

After Harris’ disappearance and before the discovery of his body on Mesa County, Willsey, a drug abuse counselor was convicted in Delta County of the attempted first degree murder of Eric Bergstrom, who was also allowing Willsey to use his large metal building for growning marijuana. Motive for this shooting was elusive until we learned from Bergstrom that Willsey had been seen with Harris’ vehicle when visiting Bergstrom at or near the time of Harris’ disappearance.

Kirk Mitchell is a general assignment reporter at The Denver Post who focuses on criminal justice stories. He began working at the newspaper in 1998, after writing for newspapers in Mesa, Ariz., and Twin Falls, Idaho, and The Associated Press in Salt Lake City. Mitchell first started writing the Cold Case blog in Fall 2007, in part because Colorado has more than 1,400 unsolved homicides.